I want to write that this is my first review of a work of non-fiction, but I’m not sure if that’s the case. True, The Element Encyclopaedia of Fairies is not a  novel or a collection of short stories, but it’s still fiction. Or is it?

The Element Encyclopaedias series boasts books on topics like witchcraft, fantastical creatures, secret societies, and many other fascinating subjects. The Element Encyclopaedia of Fairies is a reference book on, you guessed it, fairies.

Lucy Cooper, fairy expert and author/editor of this encyclopaedia, has dipped into the history of fairies and the folklore of civilisations all over the world, and she has collected stories and descriptions of mythical beings. In the encyclopaedia, Cooper has included fairies from the British Isles, but also those from other cultures in Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas and Australia. The stories are not only fascinating in their own right, but they also offer an insight into workings of the cultures that created them. This book has taught me that there are more fairies than I had ever imagined.

I recognised some of the entries, like those about the kelpies, the Green Man, and the Bucca, but others, like the Kirnis, the Bongas, and the lovely African Jengu, were entirely new to me. I suppose that nowadays anyone who is at all familiar with folklore and/or fantasy fiction knows that not all fairies are cute tiny females with wings, but The Element Encyclopaedia of Fairies proves this beyond any doubt. In fact, the vast majority of fairies are unlike anything I ever imagined. They’re not all friendly either. Some, like the Gashadokuro from Japan, are downright terrifying. I was particularly pleased to find that the encyclopaedia included the Bakru, a large-headed spirit of flesh and blood from my native country of Suriname.

The encyclopaedia contains more than mere descriptions of fairy folk. Some of the descriptions include background information about the entity in question, or even the traditional stories about them. There are also entries that deal with human authors, like Marie-Catherine D’Aulnoy, a French countess who penned traditional folk tales in the late 17^th century. There is the chapter on fairyland, one on how to connect to fairies, and another on Elementals and flower fairies. And there are pictures!

The encyclopaedia is easy to read and entertaining, much like a collection of stories, but unlike a story collection. This work provides the reader with an insight into the fables and myths of a variety of cultures as well as with a myriad of fascinating creatures.

Obviously, The Element Encyclopaedia of Fairies is a wonderful resource for writers of speculative fiction, but it’s equally wonderful for anyone who has an interest in fairies, folklore or just in the workings of the human mind.

Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

Max Brooks is the son of Mel Brooks and Anne Bancroft and he honed his craft working as a writer on Saturday Night Live, which is as good a place as any to start as a writer. His second book, World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War (to give it it’s proper title), was first published in 2006, and tells the story of a global war against zombies by using a series of oral interviews conducted by a narrator, who is part of the United Nations Postwar Commission. It is the follow-up to Brooks’ 2003 novel, The Zombie Survival Guide.

Firstly, an admission: I’m not one for fantasy novels. I drew the line after Dracula and Frankenstein, and I’m happy to say I’ve never been near Twilight. And I’m also not a big fan of disaster novels either (I’m not going to say post-apocalyptic as technically you don’t get post- an apocalypse).

I loved Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, but it was so harrowing I promised myself, as the father of a young son, I’d never read it again. I’ve also never read a comic book. But I’ve fallen for the TV series, The Walking Dead, so when my wife read World War Z, she told me I might enjoy it and should give it a go.

I think in some ways we’re all drawn to the idea of a global disaster that would test us individually and as a species. There’s perhaps something messianic in us that makes us feel that we could be the chosen ones, the survivors, and these stories help us live it out. World War Z can work as a companion piece to Walking Dead, a sort of what-happened-before, if you like, but it also stands alone.

World War Z’s story of a zombie pandemic, begins with tales of “patient zero” and outbreaks of the misunderstood “African Rabies”, through to the effect the plague has on individuals, nations and the planet as a whole, told through the words of survivors, be they politicians, soldiers, astronauts, or regular people. We trace the outbreak, the denial, the cover-ups, the quarantines, the deaths, the migrations, the wars that are a by-product of the pandemic and finally the “defeat” of the zombies and the subsequent new world order that is the result of the global upheaval. Brooks has taken on a huge task and has used an interesting narrative ploy (the multiple interviewees) to tell his story. On the whole I think he is successful.

The idea of a species threatening global pandemic is nothing new, and neither are zombies. So Brooks’ approach, to focus on the tales of the survivors, is an original take. It enables him to cover a whole trope of ideas and wax lyrically on such matters as government ineptitude, corporate corruption, and human short-sightedness, while always keeping the living dead lurking in the background (and often the foreground); a lurching virus that exists to kill and can only be stopped by being, literally, lobotomized.

Brooks manages to make mass-migration to the South Pacific, an oil field beneath Windsor Castle, a war between Iran and Pakistan and the rise of a Russian Christian Empire – amongst other plot points – sound as realistic as he does the initial reactions to the plague and the way that resourceful humans finally deal with it and its repercussions. He has a good ear for dialogue and internal monologue as well as the technological, cultural, economical and political issues that the story throws up.

There has been criticism of the novel as some feel the different narrative strands (some last for many pages, others are little more than a paragraph) make it difficult to develop momentum. But I feel that they’ve missed the point, as there seems to be an unwritten agreement between author and reader that we understand what he is trying to achieve and that we need to go with him and fill in the blanks ourselves, to notice and imagine what is going on at the edges of his snippets of stories, that we can understand what has happened, or will happen, without it being spelt out to us.

I did enjoy this book, it was good entertainment and escapism, and from a creative-writing point of view it shows some good technique; as mentioned above, Brooks employs showing-not-telling to great effect, with his second-hand narration we’re never really shown directly the linear story, instead we dip in and out from various points of view, receive good and bad reports and the opinions of reliable and unreliable narrators. I liked this technique and thought that on the whole, it worked.

World War Z is not a literary masterpiece, but an interesting read that should appeal to fans of the genre and general readers alike.

The cover of my copy of The Secret Agent shows an illustration of turn-of-the-century London at twilight in winter with lights just beginning to show on the buildings and bridges and skeletal trees black against the grey winter sky. This is a story wrapped in the cold fog of a winter’s day, with all its gloom and mystery, deep in the dark streets of late-Victorian London.

Published in 1906, but set twenty years earlier, with most of Europe in fear – real or imagined – of socialists, anarchists, Russians, Germans, Jews and countless others, we see trouble lurking around every corner and trust no one. This was a time when assassination attempts were made on the French President, and – successfully – the Russian Tsar, and bombs were exploded in capital cities, including London, and Conrad brings his own brand of journalistically observed fiction to these issues.

The Victorian London that Conrad paints so vividly feels astonishingly familiar and contemporary: A Conservative government justifying its new Aliens Bill, extremist groups placing agent provocateurs among the population and suicide bombers controlled by shady puppeteers. The Secret Agent is a brutal depiction of the absurdities and futilities of people and the deceitful institutions that some serve. It is often comic and always thought provoking.

However the true tragedy of this story lies at its core, with the domestic drama that is the family life of the protagonist, Mr Verloc, the secret agent of the title and self-proclaimed anarchist. When the façade of his marriage is torn asunder by a shockingly violent act, he and his family are altered for good, and the true nature of his “business” comes home to roost. Throughout Conrad successfully juggles the various threads of his story, managing to say as much about the human condition as he does world politics and the brainless violence of conflict.

Despite once in a while slipping into one too many Victorianisms for this reader, Conrad really gets into the heads of his subjects and manages the enviable task of creating each one equally as sad, familiar, attractive and, ultimately, human as one another, independent of which side of the blurred legal line they sit on. He ratchets up the tension when necessary and twists the story to keep the reader on the edge of his seat, cumulating in a climax I didn’t see coming. Conrad also has created a really strong female character, Winnie Verloc, a rarity for a male author of those times.

The Secret Agent is an interesting and compelling read, a real page-turner that demonstrates good characterization, plotting and old-fashioned story-telling and feels both of its time and timeless simultaneously. It is probably not Conrad’s best book, but it’s at least as good as many by his contemporaries that are regarded as classics. And beyond that, The Secret Agent blazed a trail for the copious spy, thriller and crime novels that would become ubiquitous during the following century.

The first time I laid eyes on The Long Goodbye was twenty-odd years ago, somewhere in the north-western suburbs of London, on a warm day with a cloudy look of rain on the horizon. I broke the silver-coloured spine and gulped the book down in close to one day and it was the damnedest thing that I had read in a long time. Philip Marlowe, Chandler’s erstwhile private detective, had been my guide previously through The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, but this story poked me in the teeth and socked me in the cranium.

There are detective novels and detective novels, if you walk through an airport bookshop its almost a joke nowadays. All of them have their points. There are the Victorian potboilers that straight-arm you with twists. The tweed-wrapped forensic puzzles that lurk in country-house corridors. There are the detective novels that emerge out of a downtown fog and leave you feeling like a hot shower. There are the ones that crack open a rib-cage, that strip out the veins, that saw off the top of a skull like a boiled egg – the kind of book that revolts and intrigues you in equal measures. There are those that chase you all over a European capital, teasing you with talk of God and mystery before racing off to pocket that huge royalty. And there’s the showpiece detective novel that outlasts us all, with its sharply drawn hero, intriguing plot and voice as clear as mountain air.

The Long Goodbye is none of these, it’s a novel packed full of charm and style and wit and pace and a sense of time and place, with a plot more direct that anything that Chandler had written for Marlowe previously. It sizzles through its tale of friendship and loyalty and honour, crackling like thunder with a passion unseen before in Chandler’s work.

Marlowe walks the mean streets and golden hills of Hollywood wrapped in the irony of both his disgust at the failings of the human race and his romantic opinion that everyone, and anyone, can be saved. He is our hero, our knight, as much a protector of those that society has discarded as a persecutor of those who twist it for their own ends. He will lose his personality in the felony cell so as not to renege on a friendship, but he wont take advantage of the disturbed wife of a man he dislikes; he’ll stand up to a multi-millionaire who could squash him like a fly before committing adultery with the millionaire’s daughter.

At the novel’s beating heart is the story of three men and three women: an (autobiographical) alcoholic writer who is supposed to understand what makes people tick, but doesn’t understand a thing about anybody; a strange, pampered, empty, war-veteran, torn between the dark and the light; and Marlowe, the unlikely and unwilling hero, a man for whom trouble is his line of work; and an heiress with five ex-husbands who all married her for much more than her money; the wife of the writer dragged down by the weight of her past; and a woman who may be the one to save Marlowe.

But ultimately this is the story of money, the kind of money that buys everything, that insulates and protects, but also the kind of money that cannot hide the futility and emptiness of life.

The Long Goodbye drinks a gimlet in an oak-paneled bar in early evening, waits alone in a darkened office for a phone call that will never come, is as out of place in a joint like this as a pearl onion in a banana split, and knows that to say goodbye is to die a little. With its turn of phrase, wit and reflection it is much more than a simple whodunit.

In all its sordid, bruised, hard-boiled, cool, beauty The Long Goodbye is the greatest of Chandler’s enviable canon, gritty with brutality and metaphor, and is in my humble opinion the best crime novel ever written, and one of the best books of the twentieth, or any, century.  They really don’t write them like this anymore.

I didn’t like this book. Not at all and I’m hugely disappointed.

Going in, Inherent Vice felt like something that I should love – a noir detective story set at the end of the 60’s in South California. I should have lapped it up. But I didn’t. It actually made me feel tired when reading it – not a good review for a thriller.

I’ve never read any of Mr Pynchon’s books before and I doubt I’ll be reading another. I struggled to get to the end of this one. It was tough going. It should have been textbook stuff: Grizzly private eye, femme fatale, conspiracies, murder… But Pynchon’s style, tone and story-telling are so heavy handed and tricksy that one soon tires of the plot and the characters. Not even the odd amusing line or bright metaphor can pull you back. This should have been a book about light and shade, about the tough shell of life and the soft underbelly of existence. It should have revealed the 60’s era of freedom and experimentation for what it really was, but instead it’s head-scratchingly dull and confusing.

This is a novel that lumbers under the weight of it’s own concept. Setting a noir thriller in the fudgy, selfish, self-centred late days of the 60’s counter-culture is a great idea for a novel. Unfortunately this isn’t that novel. For a start, Pynchon has too many characters: a revolving door of Wodehousesian-names (Ensenada Slim, Flaco the Bad, Dr. Buddy Tubeside, Petunia Leeway, Jason Velveeta, Scott Oof ) race in and back out again, and I found myself turning back pages to double-check who-was-who. Most of them weren’t even integral to the plot so just served as extra floss on an already overcrowded stage.

This confusion was not aided by having the main character called “Doc” and an important secondary character “the Doctor”.  Surely someone at the publishers ought to have called this one out?

And a plot that attempts to juggle this amount of characters is always going to be too complicated. Complex plots can be a good thing, especially in modern thrillers, but the writer needs to reign himself in and remember that just because he knows what’s happening, it doesn’t mean that his readers will. He can have fun, but not at their expense. After about fifty or so pages, everything just merged into one muddy background.

What more, I found myself not caring about what was going to happen (or whodunit) and certainly not giving a hoot about the amount of drugs and free love on show. This appears to be Pynchon’s cornerstone of his narrative – it’s a book about the 60s after all… But it isn’t big and it isn’t clever. And it’s certainly not original.

Not one of the characters is remotely likeable, not even the protagonist. Without a detective to root for and hold the whole thing together, any mystery or thriller is doomed to fail. We need a hero to cheer for, to connect with, to want to win. In Raymond Chandler’s essay on detective fiction, he says that the best fiction detective needs to be a white knight; he can be a loner and he can be outside of society, but he must be a moral man, a man who walks the mean streets “the best man in his world and a good enough man for any world.” I feel Pynchon should have been aware of and taken heed to these words.

Later this year, a movie version of this book is due for release, directed by Paul Thomas Anderson. I’m not a huge fan of his work, but wait with interest to see what he does with this source material. Maybe a film adaptation is what it needs. For once I hope that the film is nothing like the book.

Excuse me,” Dan said, “but there really must be some mistake. You see, I can’t go down there; I’m an atheist.”

“Yeah?” The scrawny steward’s eyebrows lifted. “Well, I bet you feel like a right idiot now, then, don’t you?”

Most authors writing anything that focuses upon the “afterlife” – and on what happens to us after the point of physical demise – tend to pose a wide variety of “what if?” questions:

What if there is no heaven? What if there IS a heaven but they won’t let me in? What if God doesn’t really exist?

Within Robert Carter’s book, Sheer Purgatory, the two most pertinent questions are perhaps somewhat more unusual. First, “What if our safety on Earth was monitored at all times by guardian angels, who watched out for our every move and ensured that we get to live a rich and fulfilling life?” And second, “What if our guardian angel was a disastrous mix, whose abilities lay somewhere between Laurel & Hardy and Mr Bean?”

For poor Dan Trench – a man whose career is solely to clean and look after the lottery balls every week, thus earning him the unfortunate title “Keeper of the Balls” from his colleagues –  this last scenario is sadly all too true. Thus, a life, destined to last a contented eighty-three years and end with a serene passing, ends up rather messily under the wheels of a number twelve London bus aged only twenty-five – due in no small part to his guardian angel getting hopelessly lost and missing his cue to avert Dan from a nasty demise.

For the angel, named Vic, it is one mistake too many (in a very long line of mishaps) and his wings are clipped by higher authorities, probably offering many further humans the chance of long and happy lives. However, for Dan, the damage is done and his day is utterly ruined.  Not only does he not get to meet his girlfriend for dinner, but he finds himself thoroughly dead, with no chance to squeeze back into his body.

Worse still, the very, very long queue for heaven takes place not amongst Utopian clouds ascending upwards into a shining funnel of wondrous light, but rather in an underground tube station, the size of several Heathrow Airports – complete with angelic staff who seem determined to be abrasive and awkward at every turn, such as the archaic administrators at the “Commandments Verification Unit”, with a large line of Biblical questions concerning coveting neighbour’s asses and following “false gods”.

“Did you ever worship idols?”

“Definitely not,” Dan said.

“Certain about that?”

“Positive. Unless you count Led Zeppelin.”

“We don’t.”

If Dan’s day couldn’t get any worse, he is soon befriended by two fellow recent departures from Earth – Carlton: a loutish football hooligan with a slobbish disposition and an addiction for junk food, alongside Nena: a young, depressive, Goth female, whose hobbies include downing large quantities of drugs with bottles of vodka.

Welcome to Robert Carter’s tongue-in-cheek view of an afterlife “heaven” – which appears more like “hell” at times, especially for the hero of the story, Dan, for whom life after death quickly turns into one nightmare after another.

Not only is Purgatory completely unlike anything he had ever imagined, but the rumour going around is that finally the “Day of Judgement” may well be about to happen, depending precisely on when “The Boss” decides.

Not only do Dan, Carlton and Nena have to navigate their way around Purgatory and adapt to new – and often weird – surroundings, but each of them may only have a few weeks to discard a lifetime of mortal sins before the big day. Naturally, this latest gossip about Armageddon causes the entire population of Purgatory to sharpen up their game. Sins are to be shed before it’s too late. Crowds of people wander the streets of Purgatory like charity “chuggers”, looking to do good for others – even if they don’t want it. Gangs of “hoodies” sneak around housing estates, planting pretty flowers to make people smile, before running away in the shadows.

In Sheer Purgatory, the late author, who sadly passed away earlier this year, keeps the tempo at a fast pace; each page is supplied with a constant stream of jokes, puns and humorous quips.

It’s difficult at times to keep up with the stream of laughs, as poor Dan slides from one difficult scenario straight into another; whether it’s filling out endless, administrative forms just to get into Purgatory (familiar to anyone who has ever had to do battle with the Department of Employment, or any testy government official), or having to deal with the constant failings of his travelling companions and recently feather-plucked guardian angel, Vic.

Robert Carter not only maintains a brisk pace, but manages to deliver his words with a sense of depth and humanity – allowing the reader to slowly peel away layers of his characters, displaying deeper levels.

Robert also succeeds in creating a sense of wanting to read onwards – with characters who create images of mirth, alongside the gradual introduction of more sinister and shadier elements of the afterlife, and raising questions that positively beg to be answered in later chapters.

In memory of  Robert Carter.

Our sincere condolences to Robert’s family.

Rest in peace.